The Brightest Sun

by Adrienne Benson

  She knew what it meant, that puff of dust. In the distance, where before everything went bad, trucks would rev their engines up that last hill, making for the barns where they’d load their beds with fresh milk and meat. No trucks had come for so long now.

  She opened the screen door and stepped out onto the terrace. The stones were curved and warm under her stocking feet. How long it had taken Martin and the Kikuyu to make this terrace. Ruthie remembered the endless lines of sweating workers, bent under the weight of baskets filled with river stones Martin had them dig and then lay in the cement he’d carefully mixed. Every day the project grew. First, Ruthie agreed to have a small patio there, just enough for guests to stand on while knocking at the door. But then she had an image of them all sitting in wicker chaises on a large stone terrace, drinking Pimm’s Cup in the evenings while the children played in the garden and the sun set—all the colors they would see in that wide-open sky where evening was short-lived but beautiful.

  The chaises were gone, long ago rotted through and never replaced. So instead of sitting, Ruthie wrapped her arms around herself and stared out at the rutted dirt road, where the cloud of dust had become a small car.

  Fifty years ago, when Martin proposed, the Solai Valley was ripe. Ruthie didn’t hesitate when he asked her to marry him and move to the farm he’d bought here. Nairobi and the Club, her life in her parents’ house, it all made Ruthie tired. She craved the land to the north and the way the space and the overwhelming sky made you feel small and free. It was in her bones, she argued to her parents, as both of them had been ranch children raised by British émigrés in the expanses of the Rift, and Ruthie herself spent her childhood summers on the farms in Loita and Nyeri where each pair of her grandparents had, at that time, still worked—eking out livings that sustained them until they died. And then the farms were sold. Her parents hadn’t wanted either of them, and there was nobody else to pass them down to. The money Ruthie inherited from each sold farm was, in fact, the seed money for the house behind her now, for the barns, for the sheep dip and the Kikuyu school they’d built at the back of the acreage. Both were empty now, the concrete lining of the dip and the foundation of the school each as dried and cracked as the land.

  What hope they’d had then, what visions of a beautiful earthbound life filled with cows and milk and children of their own that would come back to farm on school holidays and work side by side with Ruthie and Martin and the Kikuyu.

  They had had a few good years. At the beginning Ruthie was strong, and they had the patience to wait for the land to blossom with the corn they planted, the bananas and beans, and of course her daisies and herbs and the passion fruit vine she was training up a trellis in the back. They had that patience, and they had the open faces and clear eyes that made talking to each other so easy.

  They had expected to work hard for the first few years. They had also expected that, eventually, things would be easier. That the rain wouldn’t stop for so long, and that then, when it finally did come, it wouldn’t be in such great deluges that it washed away topsoil and seedlings. They hadn’t anticipated the darkness that fell into Ruthie after their first baby was born. How she would look at the tiny body asleep in her arms and have visions of leaving him under a bush for a hyena to eat, or the guilt she was racked with when the visions subsided.

  “There’s another one dead in the front field.” Ruthie spoke quietly to herself now. “Another dead cow. This drought will be the death of all of us.”

  So deep in her own memories, Ruthie was startled enough to gasp when she heard a car door slam.

  “Hello?”

  The greeting came from a woman who stood beside a small and very dusty, dented car. Her accent was American, Ruthie noted, and her dark hair was pulled back into a long ponytail, but her head and face, well, all of her, was covered in a veil of the ochre dust the dry roads had spun up under her car tires. The woman wore jeans and a T-shirt, also covered in dust, and the same sandals made of car tires that the Maasai wore.

  “Well, you’re a right mess!” Ruthie couldn’t think what else to say. She hadn’t seen a muzungu stranger on her land for so long, for years and years. She swallowed the sudden bitter taste of disappointment that flooded her mouth. It wasn’t John come back to see her. It wasn’t John, just some lost aid worker or tourist needing directions.

  “Are you John’s mother?” the woman asked as she began approaching the stone terrace.

  The words made sense. Ruthie understood each one separately, but strung together in this way, they confused her. She let the question sit. She did have a son. Was his name John? It was.

  “Yes.” Ruthie was suddenly aware of how alone she was. She couldn’t afford the house staff anymore, not to mention the farmhands, so only Samuel had stayed on. He was as old as Ruthie was and, over the years he’d worked as their houseman, had married three wives one after the other and built a small house at the back of the land. Ruthie was glad he stayed; he and his son were the ones who helped Ruthie now, a few hours a week, with the house. Samuel still did her shopping, as well, down at the market. But she couldn’t expect them to hear her if she screamed, not from this distance.

  “My name is Leona. I’m wondering if your son is here? I met someone in Narok who told me this is where I might find him.”

  For a moment Ruthie felt her brain whirring in her head, trying to find the traction to organize the storm of thoughts blowing around like leaves in a windstorm. Which son? Ruthie wondered first, then she remembered, and then the confusion subsided.

  “He’s not here anymore.” Ruthie spoke in a voice that wavered a bit, and then she cleared her throat. “What is it you want with him?”

  The woman didn’t answer Ruthie right away. She only stood there in her dusty jeans and rubber tire shoes and looked as perplexed as Ruthie felt. Then she turned and walked back to her car. Ruthie thought maybe she would get back in and drive away again, without another word. But instead, the woman opened the back door and leaned down. When she turned, in her arms, Ruthie saw, was a sleeping child.

  Though covered with the same dust the mother was, and dressed only in a red shuka and several strands of beads, Ruthie could see the child was young—only three or so.

  “What on earth have you got there?” Ruthie asked. “Why is this child dressed like a villager?”

  Ruthie knew children were fragile. How often had she watched the Kikuyu children succumb to malaria and dysentery? It was common. But a white child? Ruthie felt her neck prickling with sweat. She squeezed her eyes closed. This couldn’t happen again.

  “No, no, no!” she scolded herself, pushing away the demon thought in her head. “This is not that. This is not that.”

  She opened her eyes and saw the younger woman’s stricken face. Had she spoken aloud? It was so hard to remember anymore, what was in her head and what was outside. She spent the days speaking to nobody, and sometimes the words broke free from her mind and flew out into the world like birds from her mouth.

  “She’s not sick,” Leona said. “She’s only sleeping. It’s been a long day. We drove from Narok. The road is worse than I expected. We didn’t bring food for the trip, only a little water. It’s gone now. I came here...” She paused, considering. Ruthie saw her eyes close and open again, shifting down to gaze at the grass. “I came to talk to your son. I wanted him to meet his daughter.”

  Ruthie’s heart might have stopped just then. Her mind did. She could feel her thoughts, her lists, the memories she flipped through, even her ability to move, to speak, drain out of her. She turned into something frozen, instantly not a living thing. She forgot to breathe.

  The American woman turned to look out at the road behind them. The dust had settled, and the horizon was clear and empty. The day sky was lifting itself up, tucking the final folds of light away and drawing out the colors of the land.

  It was out of her control, this body was, Ruthie t
hought. As quickly as she’d been drained of life, she filled back up again. She didn’t want to. She wanted to stay a stone thing, to die, to disappear from here.

  Leona resumed talking, as if she hadn’t noticed that Ruthie had died and come to life again right in front of her.

  “I’m sorry, but are there villages near here? A town? I didn’t see one on the Narok road, but maybe beyond here? Close?” Ruthie saw Leona looked worried. “I can’t bear to drive back to Narok tonight. It’s too dark—my daughter is too hungry. We need to find a place to eat and sleep.”

  “You’d best come in,” Ruthie said, glancing down at the smooth face of the child. It was a girl. She couldn’t remember when she’d last seen a white child that age. She yearned to reach out and touch the girl’s cheek, her hair. Leona shifted the girl in her arms so that the small blonde head was nestled in the crook of her neck, and her hands were clasped under the child’s legs. Ruthie turned, and Leona followed her back across the stone patio and up the steps into the house.

  Ruthie hadn’t had guests for years, and she felt herself becoming flushed and nervous when she glanced around and saw how her house might look to a stranger. The tight foyer, the faded chairs in the sitting room and the cobwebs that traced the upper corners of the walls. She felt a flash of annoyance at Samuel and his son. They had gotten lazy, hadn’t they? Not bothering to do their best for an old woman.

  “Sit,” Ruthie said curtly, her annoyance shifting to the strange woman. Who was she and why had she come? “I’ll make a pot of tea. I’m afraid—” Ruthie knew the lie was coming and did nothing to stop it “—the servants are off today.”

  Martin had designed the house so that all of the rooms in the back looked out over the garden. Ruthie wanted a garden desperately. In her parents’ Nairobi house, there were always fresh flowers in vases, newly plucked herbs hanging to dry in the kitchen, and enormous jacaranda and flame trees that burst into bloom and filled the windows with lavender and crimson. When Ruthie moved here, to this house, her first order of business was to create a garden in the back. She had it all in her head. She took her time to sketch out her plan, carefully labeling her drawings with the correct genus and plant names, and using her oil pastels to plan where the pinks would go, the gladiolas, the roses and the herbs. She wanted it to be perfect. But a drought that year had slipped its fingers one by one across the land.

  At first Martin told her it would be best not to water the bougainvillea she was trying to train up the front of the house, between the windows, or the stands of glads she’d painstakingly transplanted from her mother’s garden to soften the look of the entryway. How sad she’d been to watch them die. Then he said she should forget the garden entirely. “We don’t have the resources now,” he’d warned, “not the manpower or the water. We’ve got to put everything into the farm, the cattle.”

  Now Ruthie stood in her kitchen. The polished concrete floor was cold under her feet, and the window looked out over nothing but more scrub. A lone acacia in the middle distance was a flat smudge against the darkening sky. One or two stars emerged above it. It would be a clear night.

  She heard sounds from the sitting room, a rustle and then voices—one small and thin, the other a woman’s voice. The child was awake and the knowledge of that sent a frisson through Ruthie. She felt both terrified and thrilled at the opportunity to sit near a little one again, to watch the tiny hands move.

  Only two tea bags left, but Ruthie used them both. Samuel would have to go to the market tomorrow. Only a tiny bit of milk, as well. Children liked milk. She wondered if she should pour it into the teapot or into a glass for the girl. She chose to save it just for the child and found a packet of digestive biscuits in a cupboard she hadn’t opened in days. When had she put them there?

  The girl was a dirty thing curled up like an animal next to her mother on Martin’s chair. They shouldn’t sit there, Ruthie thought. It was Martin’s chair and he wouldn’t like it. But she held her tongue.

  “So, can I ask you where John is?” Leona looked up and sipped her tea.

  Ruthie’s teacup shivered in her hand, almost tipped.

  “It’s important that I speak to him.” Leona glanced at the child when she said this and reached out to touch the girl’s head. “He needs to know.”

  Ruthie paused. The edge of her cup grazed her bottom lip and she couldn’t remember, for a second, what she was doing by holding it there, so close to her face that she could feel steam. What was that for?

  Sometimes Ruthie knew she was sliding into forgetfulness. She would notice that she’d left the tap on and that precious water was escaping down the drain. She would wake up to where she was and turn the water off or close the refrigerator door or pull the ant-covered butter from the cupboard where she’d left it days before, having forgotten, for the moment, that butter should be kept where the ants couldn’t get it. She watched this happen to her father, and she wasn’t surprised by the lapses in memory she had, the confusion. She tried hard to think of only one thing at a time, to concentrate on what she was doing. She couldn’t always, though, and the moments of lost thoughts were increasing.

  The splash of milk from the child’s cup broke into her thoughts. She’d dropped the glass and had leaped back from it while her mother fussed. “God, be more careful!”

  “It’s all right, girl, it’s all right. There’s a rag in the kitchen, down the hall,” she directed Leona. “She’s just a child, no need to scold.”

  It was much later, after she showed Leona to an empty bedroom and gave the girl some blankets to curl up with on the armchair that she realized she hadn’t answered Leona’s question.

  Ruthie sometimes wondered when things changed. Was it watching her garden die? Seeing the parched land suck the life out of every living thing it could hold? She remembered clearly that it was around that time when the life, the smiles and jokes, had slid out of her Martin. He changed the same way the land did those first years. But when the rain came—finally, after three years—and things grew green again, Martin never turned back. His face was set by then. His eyes were tired, his arms were burned the color of dirt, and his anger at the land, at everyone and everything, never left. His anger would have come again anyway, Ruthie knew, just as the drought came back. They had two years of normal rains and then season after season that were dry as bones. They were doomed from the start of this farm; the weather never settled back into the patterns they’d depended on.

  So they rarely sat on the wide terrace in the evening, having drinks and watching the children. Instead, Martin sat in his chair in the sitting room, where he drank whiskey, not Pimm’s, and Ruthie learned to be quiet near him, to keep the babies from crying. She learned to watch the way he clenched and unclenched his hands, the way the new muscles in his forearms rose and fell like breathing.

  Ruthie woke in the earliest part of the morning. The windows in her bedroom were thick with darkness and, way out there, somewhere, she could hear the whoop of a hyena. How she hated them. After the first baby was born, her blood turned thick with constant dread and terrible thoughts pushed into her brain like worms through dirt.

  It was always a hyena. A hyena that snuffled the dirt for the new baby smell and sidled on his bloody paws up to where, in her mind, her baby lay, naked and prone, innocent and perfectly unaware. In the beginning, she had no control. The pictures in her head would flicker on—the hyena would come closer and closer and she would watch as it stopped, sniffing the baby’s head and soft hair. Later she learned to force the images away by shouting. She’d let her anger take over instead, and that cut the visions short. The hyena stopped in his tracks, turning tail and slinking back into the underbrush. But her anger made her children slink, too. They would eye her warily, close their mouths and cry. How she hated herself then. How she wished she could find the words to explain that her temper was her only way to let them live.

  In the end, it wasn’t a hy
ena at all. But still, the sound of them, even after all these years, drove a spike of despair through her heart.

  * * *

  Leona woke after the sun was already above the horizon. The narrow bed Ruthie showed her to last night was hard, and the mosquito net had holes in it. All night she’d heard buzzing in her ears, and now she could see several mosquitoes resting on the interior of the net. They were thick with her blood. She turned her head and stretched her arms and legs. Her muscles hurt from hunching over the steering wheel all those long hours yesterday, fighting the bumps in the road. She sat up and pulled the useless net out from under the mattress. At least she could trap the creatures in here, hope they would die before the net was used again. And when would that be? The house looked like nobody ever came. The woman, Ruthie, seemed like she hardly ever saw another person.

  Leona noticed as she threw her feet to the floor and stood up that the room was nearly empty. There was only the bed and the net, a small table with a lamp on it and, across from the bed, a white dresser. The dresser looked wildly out of place in the simple room in this derelict house. It reminded Leona of the kind of things in her parents’ house, back in Oregon. It was shiny white, with curved edges, and perfectly round glass pulls on the drawers. There were painted flowers, faded now, but visible, along the drawer faces.

  Curious, Leona walked to the dresser and slid her hands across the empty, smooth surface. The tips of her fingers remembered the feel of this kind of furniture, even though it had been years since she’d seen anything like it. The memory pulled something in her. She opened the top drawer, expecting to find nothing but dust or maybe silverfish. But instead she found it full. Tiny linen clothes, all folded perfectly in even piles, interspersed with the smallest pairs of shoes Leona had ever seen. There were three little brown pairs of soft leather, and one little white pair with ribbons for ties.